Poincaré plots of time-frequency parameters applied to the prediction of Atrial Fibrillation termination

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) episodes are commonly encountered in the daily clinical practice and cardiologists have often to face the difficulty of classifying between terminating and non-terminating AF episodes. Given that in these critical situations a decision must be made with the utmost urgency, it would be desirable to have a visualization tool of easy interpretation that could provide a fast and reliable prediction of AF episode evolution. In this essay, a method based on Poincare plots and time-frequency analysis is presented as a new technique of AF diagnosis.